Warlock builds
Warlock talent builds are many and varied. Each tree is worth spec'ing up to 41 points in, and many Destruction builds invest more than 41 points in their primary tree. Regardless of which path a player eventually chooses, it is sure to be littered with many tough choices. To play around with the build talents and maximize DPS for raids and instances, be sure to check out this Warlock DPS Calculator ;See also: * Warlock Builds pre-TBC * Warlock Builds WotLK Leveling to 70 Affliction or Demonology are generally considered the trees to use for leveling, due to the extra downtime spent eating and drinking required by Destruction warlocks. Demonology contains many talents to increase survivability, but has few talents to increase damage until level 40, meaning that leveling will likely be slower than an affliction warlock. An Affliction warlock applies DoTs to the target and then uses Drain Life to deal extra damage while gaining health. This health can then be converted to mana via Life Tap. Improved Drain Soul gives additional mana back when killing a target while draining its soul. With practice an affliction warlock can grind through many mobs without having to stop to eat or drink. At level 40 Dark Pact becomes available, allowing you to keep an Imp on passive and use its impressive mana regeneration to supplement or replace life tapping, even further reducing downtime. Full Demonology builds only start to show comparable benefits around level 40 when Soul Link and Demonic Knowledge become available. At level 50 the warlock can respec to receive their Felguard, at which point a Demonology warlock will get a considerable boost to their damage. Demonology builds are used more for survival, and do not have the capability of killing mass amounts of things without eating or drinking. Destruction builds will kill enemies quickly at the expense of having to eat and drink a lot between fights. This may be of more value to you if you plan to do a lot of Instances. Some players like to spend 11 points in Destruction to obtain Shadowburn while spending most of their points in their other tree (usually Demonology, as Affliction has several other sources of damage, making this less useful). A more comprehensive guide to leveling, including talent selection, can be found under Leveling a warlock. What builds are good for ... ? Arena The premier arena build for warlocks is generally considered to be Soul Link/Siphon Life for its survivability, instant cast DoTs and powerful life draining. Heavy affliction builds like Unstable Affliction/Shadowburn can also be effective due to the fact that they use many instant casts, allowing the warlock to stay mobile, powerful life draining and also include Unstable Affliction for use against dispelling classes. Battlegrounds The survivability offered by the arena builds also works in battlegrounds, and there are also several destruction builds based on offloading damage as quickly as possible that are also viable. Raiding Affliction builds such as Unstable Affliction/Destructive Reach are good starter builds for new raiders as they are less dependent on gear for their damage. Once a certain gear level has been reached the Demonic Sacrifice/Shadow and Flame build becomes the highest damage raiding spec. The two most used Demonology raiding specs are variants of a Felguard raiding build and Demonic Tactics/Ruin, the second of which is especially useful for warlock resistance tanking fights. Farming As with leveling, various affliction builds and Felguard leveling builds remain the most effective specs for grinding gold and materials at 70 due to their lower down time. The arena builds are also competitive due to their survivability allowing them to engage and DoT or AoE several enemies at once and outlast them until they die. Affliction Builds The DoTs Curse of Agony and Corruption are some of the most mana-effective spells available for the Warlock. That is, the amount of damage per mana is higher compared to Direct Damage spells like Shadow Bolt. The Affliction talent tree can improve on these even more. There are problems using DoTs in parties and raids. There is a risk that the mob is killed before the completion of a DoT. This is especially bad for Curse of Agony, that causes more of its damage near the end of its duration. If this happens, then mana and time will be wasted. Curse of Elements is often used instead to avoid this problem for Curse of Agony, though it still applies for other dots. Affliction Crit 45/0/16 Talent Calculator Link This is an affliction build that utilizes the new talent Pandemic, which gives your corruption and unstable affliction a chance on each tick to crit for 33 - 66 - 100 percent damage. It also uses the improved synergy between Shadowbolts and DOT's. Going far enough down the Destruction tree to give you access to both quicker shadowbolts, and Ruin. I have not gotten a chance to test it, but it seems a very viable raid spec. Your basic rotation will be to drop corruption - UA - CoA - Siphon Soul then spam Shadowbolts. Sounds pretty familiar? Improved Shadow Bolt - On a shadowbolt crit 4% extra damage that lasts until your next 4 shadowbolts or 12 seconds. Nightfall - Standard fare - Corruption gives you a 4% chance every tick to give you an instant cast shadowbolt. Shadow Embrace - Shadowbolt now adds the shadow embrace effect - 5% extra DOT damage and 12% less healing. Stacks twice, so 10% extra damage and removing 24% of the healing a mob does. The extra damage is great, the lack of healing, eh when it is useful it is GREAT but situational. Erradication - Corruption has a chance to increase spell casting by 20%. Since a lot of your damage is still shadowbolts spam - that drops your casting speed. Look for the little batman symbol over your head. I would recomend the glyph of corruption to go with this, increases the chance for Nightfall to proc by another 4%. Haunt/Siphon Life 54/7/0 Talent Calculator Link This build goes deep down in the affliction tree improving your damage over time and slightly improving your stamina with 5 points in Demonic Embrace in demonology. It's an amazing build for farming multiple targets. Not only does it provide heavy dps but also a nonexistent downtime when played right and with decent gear. With the new talents and the fundamental changes in game mechanics with the addition and removal of several different spells and abilities it's clear that deep affliction warlocks now benefit more from Dark Pact using your imp as a manabattery also providing extra health, than spending 20 now most useless points in demonology to get Demonic Sacrifice (which additionally have been nerfed down to 10% from 15% +dmg when sacrificing your succubus. This build still support your stamina with Demonic Embrace. There are three points that are optional, you can put them in either improved healthstone, nightfall, improved drain soul, shadow embrace, virtually anything you preferr I say. I put one in Unstable Affliction although I rarely use it for farming but figured it doesn't hurt with an extra very powerful dot. Having Improved Howl of Terror, Curse of Exhaustion and an effective healthstone is all there just for survivability if things go wrong or if you get company by the opposing faction. You probably save quite a bit of downtime surviving an enemy attack rather than obsessively put all talents in use to improve your dps or healing, after all we covered all important talents in this build. Rotation & playstyle: Regardless of your gear you will want to start off easily just pulling a few mobs at a time and work from there, that is if you're new to multitarget farming with a warlock. Practise will make you better and having a decent set of gear together with this particular spec will transfer your warlock from an everyday soulstealer and gnomeeater into an everlasting farming machine gathering your epic flight money or whatever you farm for in no time. Now to the rotation and the very easily comprehended playstyle, mindlessly doting up target after target and then draining life until there are a bunch of corpses by your feet waiting for you to open them! Rotation in short: Haunt>Siphon Life>Curse of Agony>Corruption The spell i start off with is Haunt which does an instant damage along with improving your dots effect on the target and healing you for 100% of the damage it did to the target! We use this spell because of the healing effect. After Haunt comes Siphon Life, of course. The first dot on a mob should always be Siphon life, or the second after pulling with Haunt since it has a 1.5s casting time. After SL put CoA and Corruption and switch target to a new mob. I use Haunt on every other mob i pull, just make sure you always have Haunt up at all times on a mob for the healing effect. Use Dark Pact or Life Tap after doting up two or three mobs and then keep going. A classic warlock rule is to never have 100% health and less than the same amount of mana while having a SL up or draining life, it means use Life Tap when at full HP. When you feel that you have enough mobs, start life draining and learn to controll your health and mana using both Dark Pact and Life Tap moderately. I have managed to pull 10 mobs (level 67-68) at a time ending up with 100% HP and no less than 95% mana left which is insane. The only downtime in this spec really is when you stop for looting. Dark Pact/Mana Feed (Evolution of SM/Sacrifice) 33/28/0 Demonology Builds The Demonology talent tree and the use of summoned demons are what mainly distinguishes a Warlock from a Mage. Destruction Builds Level 80 Builds Farming Builts Felguard destructive leveling (7/45/18) Talent Calculator This built is used for farming and leveling. It's based on Felguard + Soul Link with the support of Fel Synergy. It has mana resources for you and your demon: Improved Life Tap + Mana Feed. It has also good spell damage bonus and Destructive Reach to decrease your threat. (sorry for my bad english I won't mind if someone will change this description) Destruction Fire Destruction with Imp (0/14/57) Talent Calculator This Build uses the Imp instead of sacrificing like most recent (Pre-WotLK) builds do. Rotation is Immolate->Incinerate (as many as possible) ->Conflagrate with occasional Life Taps. ATTENTION! This is UNTESTED, I am currently waiting for a possibility to test this. Any beta player is able to? Category:Guides Category:Warlocks Category:Talents